The Undoing

I've often thought about the "what ifs" in life: what if so-and-so didn't exist? What would have happened instead?

Apparently, it's a bit of a thought exercise, introducing logic and paradoxes. Even to the point of there being serious academic papers about it.

One of the people I follow on Twitter, @sarahlyall, a reporter for the NYT, has posted a link to the "what if" exercise that NPR's Short Wave has posted: "Paradox-Free Time Travel Is Theoretically Possible, Researchers Say."

You can play along with all sets of "what ifs" but the article mentions the "grandfather" paradox"—in which a time traveler kills their own grandfather, in the process preventing the time traveler's birth.

"The logical paradox has given researchers a headache, in part because according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, 'closed time curves' are possible, theoretically allowing an observer to travel back in time and interact with their past self—potentially endangering their existence.

Jack Finney's novel 'Time and Again' is a great time traveler tale that rests on keeping a letter from being mailed.

Apparently, researchers say that "such a paradox wouldn't necessarily exist because events would adjust themselves." Even after killing your grandfather, you'd be born anyway. Which of course means that someone other than the grandfather you know would be the one to get your grandmother pregnant. You'd just have a different grandfather.

I've played the "what if" game several times myself, imagining that John Harrison, the former FBI agent and Assistant Vice President at Empire BlueCross and BlueShield was never hired, and therefore wouldn't have been able to murder my two co-workers, firing 14 shots from two handguns, and then killing himself with the 15th shot at our offices on September 16, 2002 at 8:24 a.m.

Years ago I discussed the shootings that I witnessed with a retired NYPD police captain and she told me part of their training as police offices is to never think "what if." It's futile.

For Mr. Harrison not to be hired there would have had to be no opening—someone was already in the position. This was not the case. There was an opening since the person who held the position was let go.

The person who let that person go was a new hire who was brought on because their position was open, the prior office holder had left to join another company. So, if the person who had the old VP position had stayed on, there wouldn't have been an opening to hire the person who let the person go that created the vacancy that they filled by hiring John Harrison.

As for a time line, I've pulled the covers back from 2002 to about 1998. I could keep going. The person who was hired who left that created the opening to hire the person who let the person go who was replaced by their selection of John Harrison might themselves have never been hired in 1996. Thus, two people would not have been murdered at their workplace. They'd still be alive and we would have stayed in touch, even after I left two years after the shootings, which of course would not have occurred had all the things I outlined never happened. Then, maybe I wouldn't have left.

In all this, I didn't even touch on if someone hadn't been born, only if they had never been hired to fill vacancies that would not have been created by people if they didn't leave for other jobs or get fired. 

If I were to keep going backwards, there wouldn't be a white board big enough, or enough arrows drawn by colored markers to diagram the goings on that would not have happened.

When now tempted to play the "what if" gambit I think of the immortal word Al Pacino often utters when he was playing Lefty in the movie 'Donnie Brasco.'

"Fuhgetaboutit!"

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Squeeze Me

I think it was about three weeks or so ago that I stared at the Petronas Towers of books that accumulate on my nightstand that I wondered when was Carl Hiaasen going to come out with another one?  I was getting near the end of the two books I was currently reading, and didn't have anything on the on-deck circle.

Luckily, that morning's New York Times was providing a review of just that—a Hiaasen release called 'Squeeze Me,' another Florida-based romp through a cast of characters that are somehow resembling the current president, the Palm Beach charity crowd, and of course the blue collar people who make the line move, like Angie Armstrong, a convicted felon who has done time, as a self-employed wildlife animal wrangler who gets called to the rich properties to rid them of wildlife invaders, ranging from hungry raccoons, wrecking kitchens, to 20-foot pythons taking postprandial snoozes in trees after ingesting a big meal. "Is anyone missing a goat," Angie asks the groundskeeper in all seriousness.

I love hardcover books, but Jesus, they've started getting expensive when new. Carl's latest lists for $28.95 (U.S., always more in Canada. How do they afford it?) The discount doesn't lower the price much, either. Regardless, I had to have it.

You can always tell when a publisher has something invested in one of their authors. The physical book shows expense—and the price reflects it. The glossy cover is embossed. My older cousin once ran a commercial printing shop on Hudson Street in New York, Lyn-Art, and their business consisted of producing book covers.

I met him years ago and took a tour of his printing operation. He had an enormous Heidelberg press and large format cameras to turn the publisher's artwork into embossed book covers. His company had an exclusive on producing the covers to the 'Little House on the Prairie' books. My cousin Jimmy, went to Printing High School in the city when the city had numerous trade schools, incubators for manufacturing jobs. Something that doesn't exist today.

If you're familiar with Hiaasen's books you know the covers are a great palette of pastels, almost like the buildings in South Beach, Miami. They look great lined up on the shelf. I have several. The back fly leaf credits the front cover to VectorStock and tells us the image is "python skin texture." I wouldn't have known that without looking at the credit.

I've written before about enjoying Mr. Hiaasen's books, and this one did not disappoint. I quickly encountered Kiki Pew of Palm Beach who has gone missing from a gala, and Angie Armstrong, the wildlife wrangler who gets the frantic calls to remove wildlife invaders.

The python had been introduced, along with a treatise about how pythons have taken a liking to Florida's climate and have reproduced faster that post-war couples at drive-ins, with no one building them housing.

This posting is not meant to be a review, even though I've just finished reading the book. It's rather going to be a listing of the clever turns of phrase that Mr. Hiaasen uses that make the reading enjoyable. If you like words and humor, you'll like what you read.

The book is a generous 336 pages, with ragged right pages and a top-flight typeface. Classy. It's taken me several bedtime readings to finish it, but even at $28.95 before the discount, I'm confident I've gotten my money's worth.

Mr. Hiaasen's book is dedicated to his brother Rob, who was killed in a mass shooting on June 28, 2018 at the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis. Maryland, when a lone gunman stormed the newsroom and killed five people. I remember the incident, but I wasn't aware of the relationship Carl had to one of the victims. Apparently, the Hiaasen family boasts a number of family members as newspaper journalists.

Right from page one Mr. Hiaasen has set a word standard for describing untold wealth. The  Palm Beach crowd is the 1% of the 1%. I once read Russell Baker describe wealth as being beyond that of Croesus. I had to look it up, but Croesus was a fabulously wealthy king.  The richest guy on earth.

Mr. Hiaasen puts Palm Beach wealth a little more prosaically when he tells us..."Kiki Pew was seventy-two years old and, like most of her friends, twice widowed and wealthy beyond the need for calculation." You get the idea. As rich as Croesus.

The pandemic has upset all sorts of activities, one of which is the book tour interviews held at say a Barnes and Noble. I would have liked to have attended a Hiaasen one in New York, but rather had to get my fix by taking in a YouTube video with his editor at Random House. No questions from the audience there.

The book opens with the goings on of the Gold Coast chapter of the IBS Wellness Foundation, a group globally committed to defeating Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

Kiki Pew decided to join the POTUS Pussies, a group of Palm Beach women who proclaimed brassy loyalty to the new crude-spoken commander-in-chief. For media purposes they had to tone down their name or risk being snubbed by the island's PG-rated social sheet, so in public they referred to themselves as the Potussies.

More outtakes:

...the chromium haired heiress of two separate liquor fortunes, tag-teaming a dazed young polo star from Barcelona.

I can see him now; tanned like George Hamilton

His name was Huff Cornbright, of the anti-freeze and real-estate Cronbrights..
Rich people make money from prosaic sources. Things like brake shoes. Remember Niles Crane on 'Frazier' whose wife Marist, who we never saw, who came from a family that was vastly enriched by the manufacturing of "urine cakes" that sat inside countless urinals across the nation? They were the market, apparently.

She chose Mott Fitzsimmons, of the asbestos and textile Fitzsimmons...

Mauricio looked as if he'd rather be in the front row at a German opera...

Luckily, I've never been exposed to that experience from any row. Wagner scares me.

A python that size shits like a fire hose.
That's a frightful thought, considering when I was a little kid visiting a dairy farm owned by my mother's nursing friend from the Army, and her husband in upstate New York, when a visit to the barn afforded the unmistakable whiff of hay and manure, and the sound of fresh plops coming from the 28 cows that were waiting to be milked. I can still recreate the sound in my head. Thankfully, not the smell.

It was a Glock nine, of course, the favored armament of the white suburbanites.

Gun sales seldom decrease. Take in the Op-ed piece from a recent Wall Street Journal. 

The toxicology report showed she had enough Xanax in her blood to etherize a sumo wrestler.

...freshly divorced, self-discovering female yoga fanatics that traveled in packs, ever-alert and lithe as meerkats. 

These women are always thin. And a meerkat, being a species of monkey, who is probably flexible enough to satisfy themselves. No wonder they're always excited. 

...stole a white Chevy Malibu from an alley behind a discount liposuction clinic. 

A discount I guess is offered if you only want to lose half the weight.

...she gave  a firm yank on the noose. It elicited from Germaine a sound that one might hear from a coyote with stage-four COPD." 

And of course, if you watch even a little television, you can probably name three products that are being advertised that will treat your COPD. Not sure about stage-four though. Sounds quite serious. Probably fatal.

It made enough sense to Uric. He was grinning like a chimp that picked a padlock at a banana warehouse.

Yirma Skyy Frick, of the personal-lubricant Fricks...

More people rich as Croesus.

...the culprit should be dragged by his hairy nut sack straight from the booking desk to the death chamber. "Do not pass Go," erupted Deirdre Cobo Lancôme. (A member of the POTUSSIES.)

Mastodon railed a while longer, making air quotes with his stubby dolly fingers... 

Mastodon is the name Mr. Hiaasen has created that the Secret Service are using as a code name for the president, who is of course a character who is without any coincidence, President Donald Trump. Mockingbird is the First Lady Melania.

It was the third dead body he's found while fishing, but such was the reality of a childhood spent outdoors in Florida. It was a testament to the teen's passion for angling that he's never considered getting a new hobby.

Christian raised his hands like a teller in a bank robbery...

Silk rockets were the world's finest prophylactics, manufactured by quality-conscious, hyper-precise  Swedes. Five stars on Amazon.

"Least he [the president] doesn't smoke or drink."

"No, but he gobbles Aderalls like jellybeans. That's how he stays up all night tweeting. The pills man."

"Do they also make you forget how to spell?"

"Meanwhile my husband [the president] is screwing a stripper who's masquerading as a nutritionist of all things. I'm sure you people [the Secret Service] know all about this. She's got an ass like a Volvo sedan."

Mar-a Lago is renamed Casa Bellicosa.

Carl's recurring character Skink makes an appearance a little after the halfway point of the book. Skink is the former governor of Florida who has gone completely off the rails and lives on a tree island in the Everglades. Skink is really Clinton Tyree, an eco-terrorist who is trying to avenge every ecological wrong ever committed in Florida. He is a busy man.

The mutt, which belonged to his stepbrother, attacked several other family members before succumbing to a heel kick delivered by a no-nonsense postal carrier who's once played collegiate soccer.

The dream of everyone who wants to take out a snarling, barking dog.

The only bad thing about reading a Carl Hiaasen book is that eventually you will reach the end, and it's too soon to count on your amnesia to start the book again so soon.

Mr. Hiaasen lives in the same news-saturated world we all live in, and absorbs all there is to know by just walking past a television. He just expresses what he sees in a somewhat different manner than we might, and that of course is what makes the book.

As I write this, the first presidential debate is due to be held this evening between President Trump and Joe Biden. My guess is Mr. Hiaasen will be watching, and perhaps starting to develop a sequel should Mastodon win the election, as predicted by many.

It's a great life when all you need to keep your creative juices flowing is an intake of the news.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Notable Deaths of 2020

Year-end summaries are always expected—at year-end, not September 25th. But today's NYT  is running an obituary summary by categories, like Sports, Books, Stage and Screen, etc. in at least the online editions. The obits are also clustered by month. Many ways to dive in.

I don't know what's driving this thinking, to get a summary out there at basically the three-quarter mark of the year. I can tell I've read all the obituaries because that's what I do with every day's edition.

The Times has long learned the power and newsworthy advantage of creating tribute, or bylined obituaries. There have been days during the pandemic that the space devoted to the obit page has exceeded the truncated sports page. If the Times were to tinker with this feature any further, like they did in eliminating the TV listings, then the paper would come close to being worthless to buy. As it stands now, it does have some redeeming value.

Not that many days ago there was an obit for an artist who made an exhibition of arraying NYT obits that hit the front page.

Joseph Bartscherer arranged three decades worth of front page obits. Name the two people who were featured on the front page on the same day. No hints. Joseph Bartscherer himself doesn't make the inclusion in Notable Deaths, but of course that doesn't make him any less interesting.

His effort reminded me of the fellow who a few years ago had devoted space in a small storefront on East 88th Street solely to obituaries. Michael Brod arranged over 300 copies of obituaries from The Economist on the walls. 

The experience of viewing the installation formed one of my very early blog postings, appearing on May 6, 2009. That's how long I've been at this.

Of course with the pandemic and the added feature of giving space to people who've passed away due to the coronavirus, obituaries are popping up on the NYT pages like popcorn. No doubt whenever the pandemic is declared over, there will be a publication of these obits as there was for the people who passed away in the 9/11 attacks.

But why summarize the passing of people at the end of September? Does William McDonald, the obit page editor, know something about the fate of the world he's not sharing with us?

Can an election really be the end the world?

http://www.onofframp.blogpsot.com

Good News

There is good news on the print newspaper front! News Corporation, the publisher of The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and Barron's has announced that while it is closing its Bronx printing plant, it is arranging for its publications to be printed in College Point, Queens at the New York Times printing facility.

This shouldn't worry those who feel there might be contamination of the NYT with Rupert Murdoch muck. I'm sure they won't mix up the text and print a headline like the above under the NYT masthead. I will admit that would be like the famous stamp called the Inverted Jenny, an absolute collector's item worth fighting over. I'd pay to see that. 

For those who are unaware of who Anthony Weiner is, and why he might he famous, he is the former NYC councilman who was making a decent run for mayor several years ago when his campaign got waylaid when it became known he had "sexted" an image of his schlong to a female. Not only did he do it once, he did it twice and was jailed for it. He spent time chowing down Kosher food in the Otisville penitentiary. His wife naturally divorced him, but nothing seems to have discouraged him from again seeking the attention of the public.

Thank God for tabloid newspapers. The New York Post is of course famous for the now unforgettable headline of: HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TOPLESS BAR.

Are they teaching that one in J-school at Columbia? No? That's what's wrong with the Ivies. They're just not in touch with what people understand.

The Post doesn't hold an exclusive on the unambiguous headline. There is a Daily News headline that is equally famous that goes back to the Gerald Ford administration, when President Ford basically repelled any thought that the federal government was going to help NYC out of its 1970s financial problems.

And of course, few could miss making fun of the president's remarks caught on tape long before he became president, but remarks that are still felt to be indicative of his personality, because of course, big cats don't change.

Tabloids are great fun. You don't need to buy the paper, just read the headline as you pass the paper on the newsstand or the supermarket shelf.

For those who aren't aware of it, the College Point printing plant was opened several years ago in a revitalized area of College Point that prior to its revival was basically below sea level. It was Holland. There was the private Flushing airport that tiny planes used and the Department of Sanitation self-help refuse center, otherwise known as the dump.

When I lived in Flushing and didn't want to wait for a bulk appointment, we would drive to the "self-help" dump and deposit whatever homeowner residue there was from an improvement project. It was a cathartic experience to be directed to the enormous dumpsters that you just tossed the old storm windows into. I used to love it. And as homeowners were tossing stuff in, the workers were keeping an eye peeled for copper and brass that was bring tossed that they would later fish out for salvage money.

The Times printing plant is enormous. They've done photo inserts in the paper of the magnitude and complexity of the place. My guess is there are no public tours, much as I'd love to take one. 

So, thank God print will stay alive for at least some time to come. And mayors will come and go. And hopefully the gang at The New York Post will be there to tell us how they're doing. 

I'd hate to miss these.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Septembers

It is increasingly hard to believe that it is 19 years since 9-11 and 18 years since the shootings at Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Another anniversary for Septembers.

Because there is no definitive list of names of those who were in the buildings when the planes struck, there can't be one of those x number of survivors still alive list, like there was for say the sinking of the Titanic. There was no building occupancy list. The world is not going to be able to keep track.

Given that there were very young children in daycare in one of the buildings in front of the towers, there could conceivable still be survivors in the 90 year period after 2001. That's quite a ways off. 

Those that survived will know who they are, or will have been told.

As for the shootings at Empire, there is also no list of those who were on the floor and near the office when the shootings began. I know who they were, but I'm not likely to know where they all are now. Being that is was a Jewish holiday that day, and 8:20 a.m. is early, not everyone was in.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The dates on the stones let you measure the time
Of the lives that lived in between.
The bracketed years reveal to the current
The joys and the troubles they've seen.

On any given day a person is born
You can record the date of their birth.
And on any given day a person can die
And you can record that they've left this earth.

And the morning we made our dusty descent,
An accomplishment undiminished,
We learned of the others and their bracketed date,
And our own, that remained unfinished.

So it is incredible to believe the end can be met
At the hands of someone we knew.
He put an end to life, he put an end to himself,
But he didn't put an end to you.

Sixteen years. Still true.
No one ever dies
Who lives in hearts
Left behind.

These people left many things well begun.
And on 9/11 and 9/16, these people became memories.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

My Class is Being Called Again

Jack Roland Murphy, 'Murph the Surf,' the Jesse James folk hero of my youth, who made a famous museum heist look as easy as following directions on a cereal box, has bit the dust. Jack has signed off at 83 in Florida, likely wearing a floral shirt and leaving us as the legend who took the 563-carat Star of India sapphire from a display case at the Museum of Natural History as easily as walking out of a Tourneau store with a Rolex on his wrist without paying.  Say good night, Jack. We knew you well.

It wasn't that long ago that the NYT reporter Corey Kilgannon wrote a terrific recap of the heist, 55 years after the 1964 burglary that basically revealed threadbare museum security and a thief and his accomplice who were more daring than clever in covering their tails.

I was in high school in 1964 when the story of the heist was splashed over the New York City dailies, when there were many NYC newspapers. Photos galore of windows left open, and display cases smashed that set off no alarms. Nothing creates a legend faster than thieves who get away with it, even if they are arrested within days of the heist. A caper is a caper. Just watch George Clooney plan a casino heist with a PowerPoint presentation. We love it.

Mr. Kilgannon's piece spawned my own reminiscences of the heist.  In the 2019 posting, in the opening paragraph, I correctly predicted that Murph would get a bylined obit when he passed. And of course that's what happened, as we are treated to the inevitable Robert McFadden updated (by Mr. Kilgannon) advance obit, retrieved from the morgue.

Murph didn't make the front page like Tom Seaver, but he did hit the lower front page teaser portion of the paper that told us of the passing of: 'Jewel Heist Mastermind."

'Mastermind' is an inflated title given to someone who pulled off the biggest jewel theft on record, but was caught within days. The guys who pulled off the Isabella Gardner museum and stole Rembrandts and a Vermeer are "masterminds," because after 30 years the paintings are still not recovered and the perps are still out there, albeit possibly dead.

The Boston gangster Whitey Bulger has always been mentioned as someone who had something to do with the Gardner Museum heist. But when they finally caught up with Whitey in a Santa Monica  condo, all he had inside his walls was $800,000 is cash, but no paintings. Whitey met his end in prison, killed by someone for being a snitch who cooperated with the Feds.

With a week of Mr. Kilgannon's October 2019 piece on Murph, Maurice Nadjari passed away. Maurice was a young assistant Manhattan DA who was dispatched with a NYPD detective to retrieve the stolen gems from under a boat in Miami.

A good heist is memorable. But like a lot of things, they just don't make them like they used to.

Take the Malaysian theft of billions in Bitcoin. You might think stealing Bitcoin would be romantically portrayed. No? Not when you realize that Bitcoin is virtual money that only exists on servers. The billions were taken by electronically redirecting the bitcoin to another account. Electrons are no fun.

It wasn't  a heist, but consider the obit just written for Forrest Fenn, 90, an art dealer who sent thousands of adults on a treasure hunt.

Turns out Mr. Fenn wrote a 24-verse poem in 2010 that gave cryptic clues to a literal treasure chest of gold coins, rare gems, sculptures and other jewelry worth perhaps $2 million that he stashed somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Find it, it's yours.

Apparently plenty of people looked, and since the Rocky Mountains are in several states and an opening clue that went "where warm waters halt, and take it in the canyon down," the treasure was only just found, three months before Mr. Fenn passed away. The location of the treasure chest was not disclosed, and the finder's name was not made public. My guess is taxes are involved somehow.

They found the gems Murph stole; they found the money Whitey hid, but they still haven't found the Rembrandts and the Vermeer. The true mastermind is still out there. Come on down.

http://www.onofframp.blgospot.com

The Backstory

Through the power of obituaries, I now have the complete backstory about the hippie who on the first Earth Day in 1970 was wearing lettering on his back made with masking tape that spelled out: FUCK THE MOON FIX THE EARTH.

In 1970, the moon was very much on everyone's mind because on July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong of the United States was the first person to touch the moon's surface, fulfilling a vow made by President Kennedy that before the 1960s were over, we would have a "man on the moon." And so we did, if even President Kennedy wasn't alive to see it happen..

The fellow I saw with what some might call the first environmental slogan was amongst a scrum of hippies that were outside a store on the north side 17th Street, between Irving Place and Third Avenue.

The family flower shop was around the corner on 18th Street and Third Avenue, so I was always going through that area. The store these hippies were in front of was a store selling "Earth Shoes,"  shoes that were supposed to give you the feel of walking barefoot. They were made by Kalsø.

The backstory gets filled in when you read the obituary of Eleanor Jacobs, who with her husband Raymond, brought the style of shoe over from Europe and promoted them in the United States. The shoe had a so called "negative heel" that was lower than the rest of the sole. The shoes were wildly popular with the hippie sandal set, but soon fell out of favor after about 1977, the sales weakened by knockoffs and concerns expressed by podiatrists about the harm to the foot they might be causing.

Turns out in 1969, Eleanor and her husband Raymond were touring Europe, and of course doing a lot of walking and standing. They were in Denmark when Eleanor spotted a pair of what were then called "Anne Kalso Minus Heels." They were named after their designer, a yoga instructor named Anne Kalso. The shoes featured a wide toe box and a sole that was thicker in the front than in the back. Eleanor's chronic back pain was greatly relieved as she wore the shoes for the rest of their vacation.

Eleanor worked in the garment district, and her husband was a commercial photographer. They had a entrepreneurial spirit and opened a store on the first floor of their 17th Street brownstone, becoming the sole U.S. distributor. At that point, 17th Street was in between Third Avenue and Irving Place, a quiet residential stretch that had Willie's deli, St John the Baptist Greek Church, a real estate office and Washington Irving High School, along with other brownstones and older apartment houses on the block. The area is pretty much the same today.

They didn't really have a name for the store or product until they asked the convoy of hippies that were walking past the store one day in April 1970 where they were going. "Hey man, it's Earth Day! There is a love-in down the street in the park."

"Down the street in the park" was nearby Union Square, then and now a gathering place for all sorts of assemblies.

Smacked with marketing eureka, Raymond quickly named the store "KALSØ EARTH SHOES" and the rest became marketing history. Huge success, until the air went out of the balloon.

The Jacobses' business however was soon hit with competition and eventually they declared bankruptcy in 1977. According to Eleanor in an interview the Litchfield Enquirer in 2000, the bank that had lent them money "didn't trust us, nor our flower children. nor our unconventional marketing strategy despite our steady growth and profits."

Apparently, there is still an earth shoe called Earth Kalsø Shoes from a company that was revived in 2001, Earth Inc.

Who knows, the fellow who informed the Jacobses that it was Earth Day, might have been the fellow who had the slogan spelled out in masking tape on his back.

An Earth Day doesn't go by that I fail to remember his sentiment.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

Kitty Genovese and Sophia Farrar

Just when I thought I'd never read about the 1964 Kitty Genovese attack in Kew Gardens again, along comes Sam Roberts's obituary on Sophia Farrar, 92, a neighbor of Kitty's who was with her immediately after she was viciously stabbed in a mugging and tried to comfort her as she was taken away in an ambulance. Kitty died en route to the hospital.

It takes a reporter of Mr. Roberts's age to write such an obituary, most of which I have no doubt he could do from memory. My guess has always been he and I remember the same mayors and presidents, and probably saw Bambi when it was first run in the movies.

The obit might just be the piece that puts a lid on a story that really has never seemed to go away, particularly to this teenage resident of Flushing in 1964.

Without completely repeating the story which is so ably recapped in the obit, the era of the 1960s in Queens is firmly etched in my memory. After all, I was born in Flushing when Truman was the president, and lived there for 43 years.

The World's Fair opened in Flushing Meadows in 1964, after much delay and cost overruns. Shea Stadium opened, finally giving the Mets a home after spending their initial, hapless years at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan. The city was jumping.

Traffic through that area of Queens on the expanding Long Island Expressway was an absolute mess. The World's Fair and Shea were being built at the same time. Houses were sprouting up in Nassau and Suffolk counties like dandelions. The migration out on the Expressway was measured by the exit number of your new home. "We're just 10 minutes from..." People were buying lawnmowers and rakes.

The story of the mugging and death of Kitty Genovese took hold in the consciousness of the nation after the NYT ran a story in their Sunday Edition by A.M. (Abe) Rosenthal, an executive editor, that basically painted the residents of Kew Gardens as a callous. indifferent lot who listened and watched a woman be savagely murdered at 3 a.m. and basically went back to bed.

The reporting was false, and Mr. Rosenthal stood by it even after more was known about the response of the residents and the inaccuracy of the reporting. He was interviewed in his antique-filled apartment for the documentary, 'The Witness," produced by Kitty's youngest brother Bill and pretty much thumbed his nose at any hint he was wrong.

The Rosenthal piece rapidly gained traction as an example of indifference to the plight of others. It basically slandered an entire community and borough. When the story about 38 "witnesses" who did nothing was unfurled I remember thinking to myself, how did they know it was 38? They counted that many heads that popped out of windows and then went back to bed? The image from the words was too far fetched.

Mr. Rosenthal took the number from a police report that counted 38 people who were interviewed after the mugging. Some did try and call the police. Some only heard screams, but actually saw nothing, and considering where they were in some buildings, could not have possibly seen anything.

In that era, there was no 9-1-1 centralized way to reach the police. You either dialed O for Operator, like in the movies and asked for the police, or you knew the precinct's phone number and they answered. They were never too eager to answer the phone. It was a different world.

I always remember my father and a neighbor asking each other if they knew the telephone number for the local precinct if they had to call them to report something. Neither man did.

The above photo included in the online presentation of Mr. Roberts's obit is of Sophia Farrar in 1960 with her young family, probably taken on a Sunday when everyone seemed to dress up, going to church or not. Your "Sunday best."

How odd it is to look at a photo from an era I was a teenager in, It looks like it was taken by Matthew Brady at a Civil War site. I almost expect to see a tent pitched in the background near a wagon wheel.

The Kew Gardens area where the mugging took place is basically unchanged around the Kew Gardens LIRR station and Austin Street. There are still Tudor style buildings, and the viaduct over the tracks with stores is still three, but I've  been reading is in imminent danger of collapsing. The "Ponte Vecchio" of Queens.

To Mr. Roberts's credit, he clears the air of Mr. Rosenthal's obstinance and quotes Joseph Lelyveld, a NYT executive editor in the 1990s as admitting that the reporting that omitted the presence of Sophia Farrar coming to the aid of her friend and neighbor as "inexcusable."

There are plaques and memorials all over the city. Perhaps there should be something there for Kitty and Sophia.

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DT

President Trump is right, although I didn't know he made a trip to Nassau County, New York and met my wife, because I've come to conclude I'm living with a domestic terrorist.

It wasn't always his way. Perhaps it's the work-form-home syndrome that's set in rather than the nearly 45 years of  marriage that have come to affect her cerebral cortex, because believe me, she's become a little crazy.

The house is sufficiently large enough and empty of offspring that even with her being in the 25th week of working from home, we barely collide during the day. I'm in my 10th year of retirement, so up to now haven't been spending much time together during daylight hours other than on weekends.

She's been going to work and taking part in all that entails: water cooler chatter, break room gossip, and cake for co-workers' birthdays. I get it. Staying home is dull, and it has to be affecting her nervous system.

How else do you explain the sudden expulsion from the downstairs medicine chest items of mine that are health related. "They get in between my lotions." They've been cast aside to the adjoining counter top, like a crazy ex-girlfriend who has dumped her boyfriend's clothes, bike and bowling ball on the sidewalk. My preferred cold remedies have been evicted.

Okay, granted the Daytime and Nighttime bottles of the generic NyQuil are a little large, but hey, considering unit pricing, they were a steal, especially with my Bonus Bucks coupon from CVS. And with a little re-arranging, I made them fit.

It was obviously the "little re-arranging" that did it. I strayed into North Korean airspace in what is basically a large medicine chest, certainly large enough for a geriatric couple to comfortably
co-exist with their life sustaining medicines, potions and lotions.

My own little corner of this penthouse of space did expand a little due to the addition of four safety cap canisters with tiny print of prescription medicine that were added to the already small variety in place. A recent health event has necessitated taking up a little more space. I'm not being denied that space. I must still be loved.

But suddenly, even the variety of band-aids has came under scrutiny. I ask you, if a finger is pricked, am I the only who bleeds?

The medicine chest dispute won't however require third-party arbitration, and certainly won't require taking any Millennial advice from the NYT on how to survive the pandemic.

Forty-five years of marriage have taught us how to survive each other in all conditions. Negotiations are underway.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com

David and Goliath

The returns aren't all in yet, but the click count for the prior profane posting on the NYT eliminating their TV listing section has taken off—just a bit.

It gained a retweet from a respected former journalist, and was acknowledged by a current one as a column, "that beat them up." Another current one seems to hear the pain. Nothing personal, just a screed.

How I'd love to think that the tirade, along with no doubt others transmitted to the NYT, would have the effect of restoring the TV listings page. Time will tell, but it's not on "our" side. We'd need a reprieve from Governor Sulzberger.

Many, many years ago I once shamed the Paper of Record into restoring the entries, or the race results to the sports page. It didn't last long, and when they finally disappeared for good, I was resigned to their elimination.

We have to face it. The Children of the Times will effect their changes regardless of what the Old Guard says. There's beach erosion, and there's print erosion, and right now we're experiencing both. Overall, it's all climate change.

I'm not sure I've figured out a work around for what would have been a daily intake ("consuming") of TV listings. The paper has correctly pointed out that more people are at home working and binging on TV shows. Given that acknowledgment, they still whacked their TV listings. This "streaming" thing might be bigger than all of us.

I've expressed my worry to the obituary page editor Bill McDonald that if they whack the obits page like they've whacked the sport and TV listings, then they can count on one less grey-haired reader whose life will outlive their readership. Cancellation is always an option.

A way perhaps to revive the TV listing page could of course lead to advertising. What's wrong with that? Newspapers once upon a time were completely fueled by advertising. Probably what keeps the obits page going these days are the paid death notices, which can be quite lengthy, and therefore quite expensive and lucrative. The page is a profit center. Why not the same for the TV listings? There was never an ad on the what was the old TV page.

If the next health scare results in more paper work than just insurance claims and co-pays, then the offspring may be faced with the task of fulfilling one of my sarcastic wishes made several years ago.

Only half-kidding, I made it known I wanted to be buried with three newspapers. The Wall Street Journal over my brain; the Daily Racing Form over my heart, and the New York Times swaddling my rear end.

And my wife and I have raised the two daughters who just might do this. They feel my pain.

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Wrong-Headed

The NYT took part in writing its obituary the other day. They explained why after 81 years of providing TV listings they were now NOT going to provide TV listings in their print edition.

If you're not aware of how the Times reports things these days they not only attempt to bring you news of Malaysian malaise, but they also try and tell you the "backstory" of how clever they were to deliver the story, any story. They do this on Page Two.

Thus, in Saturday's paper they explained why after 81 years of providing TV listings they were wisely NOT going to provide TV listings starting as of the print paper's Monday August 31, 2020 edition. And lest you think they gave us all a reprieve, they didn't. I opened Monday's paper, and no TV listings, as they proudly announced.

The Times of course will continue to cover riots, protests, coronavirus outbreaks, presidential elections, hurricanes and statue topplings. They will not however tell us what's on Turner this evening. Or HBO, or Showtime, or even Channel 2 with their 5-word reviews about the show.

The Times of course is being run by people who buy $6 coffees and pay for it with a tap of a key fob. As I've gotten older I've gotten used to the fact that the people running things have gone to school with backpacks and cell phones attached to their hands. They don't carry books to school, but rather passwords to log onto who knows what.

Listen to some of the claptrap reasons The Times has now abandoned providing TV listings:

• The majority of subscribers won't even notice the removal of the TV grid and the What's on TV column after this weekend's papers. (Oh yeah? Where's the results of the survey you didn't take?)
• For years now the Times has published the grid only in its New York City edition, and not the national one. (What the fuck do you think "New York" means on your masthead?)
• We are firmly in the streaming age, and the TV grid no longer reflects the way people consume television. (What a load of elitist bullshit. "Consume" television! Like I fucking eat it! I may watch it, but I do not eat it!)

So, just as I've recently gotten access to Amazon Prime and Netflix, I can longer find out if there's something streaming in the print edition. We're in the "steaming" age, but I can't find out what's streaming! Gilbert Cruz, the editor of The Times's Culture Desk, should have his passwords revoked!

Their "Finale for the Daily TV Listings" obituary by Sarah Bahr (who I'm sure doesn't remember the same mayors and presidents as I do) goes on for two 8-inch columns. It is filled with more condescending comments about how people don't even want the listings, and about how if they do complain, The Times will listen. "But now [Mr Cruz] he thinks even those who don't like the decision will accept it." Don't tell what you think I'm going to accept, you smartphone, online, condescending editor.

The Times seems to have forsaken the part of their name that indicated where they are published from, namely New York.

They no longer seem to have a New York section to go along with their International and National sections in their A section. They don't send reporters to sporting events, even if it's to the home town playing someone. Seen an Islander score lately as they skate their way toward this year's Stanley Cup? Seen any box scores from the Mets and The Yankees.? Tell me about it.

A lifetime ago in the middle '60s when I was in high school, a kid in home room class who sat behind me, Mark Goldberg, grumbled that the New York Times was only good for stories about "Belgium imports." His critique has stayed with me all these years.

And if the NYT can now use language that they once would have never contemplated, even if it is a direct quote from a Republican Congressman directed at Alexander Ocasio Cortez (known by her Twitter handle as AOC), then I can use language that wouldn't have been allowed in print years ago.

The [New York] Times sucks!

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